How To Motivate Employees to Contribute Content

Sometimes it can be like pulling teeth to try and get others in your organization to contribute to your content development strategy. Of course the excuse is inevitable “I have no time” or “I am still working on it”, amongst probably hundreds of other reasons why employees can’t help. But its funny how when you add an incentive with it, everyone can somehow find time to contribute. Like magic, peoples schedules suddenly free up or that post they have been working on for 2-3 months, is finished the next day.

Lets face it, many people are not motivated unless they are compensated for their time. Which is understandable. If someone is going to take time out of their day or work on something at night or on the weekend, they should see some reward or gain from it.

Before we get into the different ways you can encourage employees to contribute content, it should be said that you should set standards to keep only high-quality content that is being produced. If you just say, we will give each employee $25 per post…you will be amazed at what will get put in the queue to be approved. Depending on your blog or type of content you are looking to create, try to make sure there are best practices being implemented.

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Ok, so now lets talk about the different ways you can go about motivating your employees to help contribute to your content development strategy.

Performance-Based Incentives

This is a fun way to add incentives to employee contributions. The goal behind this type of incentive is that the better your content performs, the better the incentive will be. Performance-based incentives can be number of comments, number of ReTweets, number of Facebook Shares, number of unique visitors, time on site, etc… This will encourage employees to take the extra time to create higher quality content, because the metric for compensation is performance-based. Creating a pay scale that correlates with performance would be a way to compensate each employee.

Monetary Incentives

Probably the most used and easiest incentive program would be to simply pay an employee for each blog post they write. Typically between $25-$50/per post is a good range to start with. Of course you can have different pay levels depending on the completeness and effort that was put into the post

Company Acknowledgments

For the employees who are not motivated by money, sometimes giving kudus or acknowledgment across the company is just as effective. Especially for larger companies, employees who are looking to gain recognition among their coworkers and managers are great ways to get employees to contribute content. An idea could be to recognize the employee who wrote the most blog posts for that month, by sending out a company-wide email congratulating the employee.

PTO Incentives

What employee wouldn’t like more paid time off? Giving employees additional days off or the ability to leave early one day, can possibly arm you with more content than you know what to do with. An idea would be for every blog post you write, you accrue a certain amount of additional PTO time. You can also wait until the end of the month and the person will the most posts written will get a day of PTO next month.

End of Year Prize

Sometimes the previous incentives I mentioned only work in the short-time and do not fulfill the companies long-term plans for content creation. A way to motivate employee for the long haul is to have a long-term incentive program. One idea would be to give away a vacation for 2 that can be redeemed by the winner at a time that is convenient to them. Another idea would be to give away gifts at the end of the year for the top contributors. You could also try a raffle where each post you write gives you an entry into the end of the year drawing.